George Washington Foster Jr.

George Washington Foster Jr. was born on the second of October 1866 at New Brunswick, New Jersey, the son of George Washington Foster Sr. — a Black Methodist Episcopal minister of the New Brunswick AME Zion congregation — and Eliza Ann Bias Foster. He was raised in the New Brunswick parsonage and educated at the New Brunswick public schools.

He enrolled in 1881 at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York at the night school of free architectural instruction, and completed the three-year course in 1888 under the architect Henry Janeway Hardenbergh. He took employment as a draftsman immediately after Cooper Union at the firm of Henry Janeway Hardenbergh and then in 1889 at the firm of McKim, Mead & White — the principal American architectural firm of the post-Civil-War Beaux-Arts period.

He spent the following six years at the McKim, Mead & White Manhattan drafting room — among the first Black draftsmen at a major American firm — and contributed to the firm’s drawings for the second Madison Square Garden of 1890, the Brooklyn Museum of 1895, and the Boston Public Library of 1895.

He was registered in 1899 as the first African American architect of the state of New Jersey, and opened his own practice at Newark in 1899. He moved the practice to New York in 1908 and entered partnership with Vertner Woodson Tandy (placed in this archive) in the firm of Tandy & Foster — the first Black-owned architectural firm in New York City.

The Tandy & Foster firm designed the Saint Philip’s Episcopal Church on 134th Street and Seventh Avenue at Harlem (1911) — at the time of completion the most prominent Black-designed church building in the United States.

He died at New York on the twenty-fourth of August 1923 of complications of stroke, at fifty-six.

He is honored here as the principal designer of Saint Philip’s, Harlem.